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Written for the special Italy Number 

of The Journal of American History, 

January-Februar)f-March, 1919 

Copyright, 1919, by Frank Allaben 



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JUN 19 ]91S 



I 

Hail, Italy, kindled 

Out of the ash of death ! 

Italy, bruised and crowned 

In glory of thy gashes ! 

Through seven seals unloosed, into thy book 

Of revelation let our wonder look. 

War's caustic scours imaginary sight. 

And we no longer dream we see 

The ghost of Rome in risen Italy — 

Time's restless apparition walking 

The Mediterranean mid-way in a mirage 

Whose glitter in the blue mirrors of the air 

Seemed but an echo of thy ancient light. 

Earth's suffering flesh and blood 

Now battle-griefs attest thee. 

Even as pangs of war 

Revived thee when the Corsican swept by, 

And we beheld thee stir, 

Disquieted out of silence. 

A blind dismembered thing, we watched thee waking 

Thy ten disjointed segments; watched their squirm 

Within as many tyrannies, 

Writhing to knit up seams long ripped and frayed. 

Then rose thy orb of empire, lit 

Like a new pole-star in the purple north. 

Reared on a throne above the Piedmont hills, 

Sheer over Savoy's House, whose cry empowered 

Cavour's and Garibaldi's, gathering up 

Maazini's dream unbroken out of night 

Into substantial day. 

We watched thy blowing garments 

Wing over sapphire seas. 

And climb the dreaming airs 

Into the golden sun. 

We saw thee print upon the Red Sea shore 

Thy Abyssinian sandals ; 

Snatch from the shoulder of the smitten Turk 

Tawny-colored Libya 

To gird the loins of thy strength ; 

Out of his turban tear 

Tripoli's black diamond for thy diadem ; 

And stride from isle to isle before 

Adalia's slumbering door 

To bid thy antique ward, old Asia, 

Quit the grey tomb of her antiquity. 

[1] 



ITALY REVEALED 

We heard Marconi's pathless hghtnings speak ; 

We saw the brawn of thy battleships give 

New patterns to the sea. 

Yet all thy motions staged a pantomime 

That twinkled through our winking eyes 

To glimmer in a thought, 

A pageant filmed, a marvel screened, 

Part posed and part imagined. 

What curious thing, half-wraith, half-life. 

Could shimmer, half-emerged, 

Out of the chrysalis of a thousand years? 

Who'll unroll, Italy, thy seven-sealed book? 

War, blistering war. 

Hell's light of revelation ; 

The branding iron of reality 

Hot on the quick of the soul ! 

War stamps thy succoring image 

On the coin of our need. 

Not war thy Spurred Boot swinging 

Hard at the Musselman — 

But unto us an unimpassioned rumor 

Carrying no report 

How, in the fevered frame of thy unquiet, 

Prophetic intuitions stretched and strove. 

Training behind a veil their life-and-death 

Struggle with destiny. 

Never could war to chip the stony Turk 
Chisel thy statue heroic in our heart. 
Maniac war reveals thee : 
Satan incarnate in gorilla herds, 
Mauling the face of man, 
The heart of Belgium, and the soul of France, 
Resisting, dauntless, like an angel torn, 
One shoulder slit and limp. 

Justice was smitten on the cheek ; 

Faith, being ravished, fainted away ; 

The hopes of nations fell ; 

The dry lands swayed like seas ; 

The age bowed down and trembled, her pillars knocking together; 

The peoples staggered like a drunken man. 

Flung out of pillowed slumber, dreaming Peace 

Swooned into rigid nightmare, staring up. 

Gazing where heaven weighed the quivering earth. 

Hung in a balance high above our hope. 

Italy, it was then our anguish threw 
Out of her black suspense a frantic look 
That caught thy noble gesture in the sky. 
Casting thy gloiy's weight 
In just neutrality that tipt the scale. 

[2] 



ITALY REVEALED 

That tipt the scale, for out of thy frontier, 
Slung from a sling, the hurtled sons of France 
The invader smote and stretched along the Marne, 
Prone as Goliath in the sling of David ; 
While, cruising up the round ball of the world, 
Securely ferried through thy friendly seas, 
Justice assembled her crusading knights. 

As, locked within the firmament, the star 

Of hope that jewels morning sudden shines 

Out of his crystal casket, so we saw, 

Shining through thy neutrality, thy heart. 

The Mind that thrills the pulse of kings and nations 

Bids, Italy, thy loosed first seal enthrone 

Grave-visaged Justice, weighing iniquity. 

II 

He who thy palsied orbit raised again 

Out of the sepulchre of ruined worlds. 

Had timed thy perihelion to earth's need ; 

And now the event that loosed thy second seal 

He nursed in secret through ten bitter months 

That travailed in thy soul to be delivered 

Of faith, precocious in thy womb — 

Thy leaping infant, struggling for mastery 

Over the interloper, German greed, 

With covetous fingers crooked 

In surreptitious clutch in the walls of life. 

When the gorged dragons, clawing Russia down, 
Filled earth with wailing, clang ! the clock of God 
Began to strike their doom — thou, Italy, 
God's hammer on the gong ! 

Yet swift as thy knighted sword 

Knelt in the bending vow, 

The crouch of the couched panthers sprang. 

Fraud and dishonor, flung 

At the throat of thy plighted word 

To strangle faith in the dust 

At the feet of the hope of the world ! 

God knew — His purpose through thy borders walked, 
Bringing thy help, hid in a poet's heart. 

The whirlwind caught d'Annunzio, 

And on the blast he rode 

To Quarto hard by Genoa, 

Thy people, like the swirling gusts of spring, 

Delirious around. 

From Genoa thy visionary son 

Plowed the unknown till his long furrow burst 

Into the hopeful soil of a new world. 

[3] 



ITALY REVEALED 

From thence, to weave up thy unravelled lands, 
A new Columbus, Garibaldi, sailed 
With his immortal thousand, steering south. 
And here God's finger, in a poet's spirit. 
Builds thee an altar, o'er whose cry we see 
The heavens open and a flame leap down. 
Lighting a hurricane of sparks and brands 
That blow a roaring furnace in thy soul — 
Till God forge victory. 

To Rome a peril clings, like fallen clouds; 
Out of the north, to Rome, th}- tempest whirls 
Its purging fiery pillar. 

Now let thy poem be, Italy, 

Both seen and heard. 

Rome weaves through evening's silence her shouted word 

Into an insurrection of delight. 

She weaves a tapestry — 

Through the warp of the air, 

The woof of the patterns of her ecstasy 

Dartles and hangs and swings, loud-floating there. 

She weaves her torches through the black mat of night. 

And thrilling threads of flaring hearts, more bright ; 

And into a wild bewildering roar 

Her multitudinous shuttles pour 

The poet-tribune, mobbed by jubilation. 

Wheeled on a chariot-throne of exultation. 

What Caesar's Rome 

Brought such a pageant home? 

Beyond that chanting blaze 

Of light's processional through the slinking dark, 

Billow and his Italian shadow crouch. 

The knives cringe back. 

The fingers tremble. 

Afraid to stab 

Thy faith and honor, 

Standing circled in the light. 

Beyond the dark and his penumbra's blight ! 

Then, gushing out, thy burning wrath's 
Passionate denunciation, 
Volcanic through d'Annunzio, 
Treason consumes to ashes, fleeing Rome. 

'Tis mid-May : ruddy as the morning sun. 
Spring, bursting through the winter of the world. 
Around thee flings the flaming rose of war, — 
Fragrant as angels over nightshade use 
To put to death the noxious weed of evil, — 
Red-woven to a scarlet coronal 

[4] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Set in the tresses of mysterious night 
Over unfathomable shining eyes. 

The second seal stands loosed : thy frowning book 
A gleaming messenger of vengeance shows, 
Like red coals staring out of cloudy wrath 
In at the murderous serpent coiled in man. 

Ill 

War grips thy mountains at a bound : 

Hunting the Hapsburg whelps. 

Thy bold Alpini swing from crag to crag, 

Fighting earth, air, snow, ice, hunger — and man ! 

Twelve months thy sword victorious climbs the Alps, 

A signal in the night. 

Thy bayonets prick the Turk, menace the sly 

Flesh-eating jackal of Bulgaria. 

But Serbia, shattered, Montenegro, mangled, 

And bruised Albania, lean against thy finger, 

Stretched down to help all three. 

And Verdun, sacrificial Verdun, bleeds. 

Heaping her altar with the blood of France. 

The world stoops faint, in sackcloth, sorrowful. 

Like a black mist, discouragement covers the earth. 

Only around thy head lives light — 

Over the northern mountains 

Thrown like a halo from the silver band 

Of six score ransomed towns that crown thy brow. 

Wreathed in a curve from lofty Stelvio 

Four hundred miles to Carso's horny beak. 

Watching the Adriatic. 

Thy hills wear light : huddling to smother it. 

The crafty dragon of the Danube shrugs 

Her mottled foldings through the Trentino, looped 

In gorge and coiled on peak. 

Soon as thy war's first year new mid-May meets. 

The wyvern strikes thy buckler — strikes and strikes, 

As furious torrents ram a dam to seize 

The shuddering land below. 

Thy sons fight, backward staggering, step by step. 

To where the verge o'erhangs their homes: there stand, 

A rocking barrier on a dizzy brink. 

Through May, through June, six weeks, — a tumult, scrambled, 

Of earth and air and sky and waterfloods, 

Armies and rocks and mountains, sweating blood. 

Hate, hydra-headed, swarms : two thousand throats, 
Arched from the Val Sugana to the Val 
Lagarina, five score to the mile, 
Bark flaming death and cough up killing gas 

[S] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Out of their black abysses. These have crunched 

Antwerp, Liege, Laon, Ivangorod, 

And Brest-Litovsk, strongholds of Belgium, France, 

Russia, and Poland. Hooded and puffed, they strike. 

Horribly animated to mutilate. 

Aching to fang thy right flank from the rear, 

And seize and throttle, through her unguarded door, 

France, forspent at Verdun. 

Flushed stands thy third seal loosed : we see the power 
That upheaves towns and crumbles fortresses, 
Unanchoring iron out of masoned stone 
■As Samson tore the gates of Gaza up — 
See the gross demon of the might of evil 
Recoil from Justice, soldiering in man's heart 
That foams and gallops, wild and violent. 
In the long agonism of good 'gainst evil. 

Hell's horror clings through June. In hot July, 

Back, snarhng, dripping, slinks the baffled fiend, 

As, by indomitable Alpini led, 

Like flames ascending up a rising wind. 

With garlands on their helms, through smiling lips. 

Thy irresistible children, Italy, 

Scourge with the songs of their spirit, lashing g^ns 

That know not how to answer, being cast 

Only to tear the flesh ! The bruised dragon 

Flees, rolling up the mountain ; round thy sons 

The light of God still walks the shining Alp ! 

Prefigured in a semblance, here f orethrown 

On the Trentino, as against a screen. 

Thy loosed third seal predicts great wrath to come — 

The victory of anguish, long dragged out, 

Walking the furnace of the forge of God 

Toward Italy redeemed. 

Often as rushes the swift leviathan 

To whelm us through the broken dike of earth, 

God thrusts thy spirit, Italy, in the gap 1 

IV 
Three acts have staged their play ; four haste them on. 
Thy fourth seal stirs, the number of a man. 
Impetuous to begin. Thy left guard stands 
In the Trentino, feinting; like a nerve, 
Cadorna swings the right hand of thy power 
Across the Isonzo, and Gorizia falls. 
As falls Tolmino — falls, to rise redeemed. 
August is gladdened by that staggering blow. 
September sees thee seize San Grado so — 
Sees thy assistance of her cause 
Lift wearied Verdun into a pause. 
October eyes thy serpent-cutting sweep 

[6] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Far up and on and into the Carso leap. 
November sees thee stun that same plateau 
With a new overthrow. 
Twice five thy vistories in that craggy war 
That earth and heaven blots into one scar. 

The miracle of human spirit ran 

Unloosed in thy fourth seal, 

Whose prodigies reveal 

The glory of the stature of a man. 

By children, women, and by men, 

In ice and heat, in storm and sun, 

What man can do is done. 

Calling the age of exploits back again. 

Hail, Alpini, lions of the rocks ! 

Hail, winged Titans, eagles of the sky ! 

Hail, Arditti, tigers of the trench, 

With bombs and knives — and fingers in a throat ! 

Hail, soldiers, victors on the Alp ! 

Hail, sailors, conquerors at sea ! 

Hail, valiant women and heroic children, 

Grinding at your tasks, warring in your hearts ! 

Hail, King and Queen, 

Man and woman glorified. 

Battling on the front, fighting at the sick-bed. 

Loved in all the land, and honored in the earth ! 

Hail, Italy, blazoned in the badge of God, 

The decoration of a million wounds ! 

What billows roll the music of that epic? 

What thunders crash the chorus? 

Trumpet your psalms, ye Alps ! 

Create a symphony 

Of blending land and sea ! 

And listen, all ye sons of Italy ! 

Let San Martino and Cortina sing. 

Whose shaggy-gleaming eyes grew eloquent. 

Watching their freed kin where your swift advance. 

Cracking the iron of the Austrian keep. 

Unchained the giants of the Dolomites. 

And let the tidal choral, tuned to these. 

The Adriatic and Ionian Seas, 

Tell how your convoys through their waters sprang, 

Steering the Serbs to Corfu and Valona, 

Where ail our anxious navies learned to foil 

Ubiquitous submarines and perilous mines. 

Let charmed Zarola out of her thrilling breast 

The tempest of a deep contralto fling. 

To sing around you, heroes, how she saw 

You climb the shoulder of her towering mate 

And off the Altissimo of Monte Baldo brush 

Crawling invaders like a swarm of ants 

Into the vengeful chasm. 

[7] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Ransomed Trieste, tell how, through your soul, 

Drooping in bondage to demonic hate. 

The wing of expectation flew, as swiftly 

Into your port the Istrian Sauro sped, 

Swooped down a ship, and like a hawk whirled out ; 

So doing, repetitious, till they slew him. 

Tune your loud torrents, Monte Pasubio, 

And chant the anthem of the gallant fight 

That round your loins hung victory for a girdle. 

Buying your freedom with a holocaust. 

Ring out, Durazzo ; chime four different deeds 

That awed your harbor on as many days 

From four torpedo-boats : how each pounced in, 

Devoured a dragon-ship, and soared away. 

Hearken, ye engineers ! hark, and rehear 

The orchestras of a thousand hills rehearse 

The oratorio of a thousand scores 

That mid reverberating plaudits sang 

Your fearful blowing up of Castelleto. 

And listen, while Trieste trills again 

Her glee when gallant Rizzo rocked her bay. 

Blasting a battle-monster, blowing another. 

Gaping and paralyzed, against the sea. 

Cry, Monte Cucco, wonderments of May 

That made your passion kiss their soldier-feet 

That leaped incredibly Isonzo's gorge 

And ran up rocky barriers. Pola, sound 

Daring as wonderful, when Pellegrini 

With only three companions at your feet 

A dreadnought slew, torpedoed. Sing, ye joys 

Of saved Bainsizza ; every August wake 

The prickly hills that stud your thorny plain 

Into an anniversary carnival 

To vivify again and celebrate 

Glorious achievements that the Julian Alps 

Perceived with wild amazement ! Italy there 

Leaped like a cub through Austria's scampering camps. 

O'er thousands, prisoner, and, spectre-like. 

Stood beckoning on Hermada, o'er the rim 

That bristles round Trieste ! Answer, waves 

That swim the Adriatic, roll us out 

Your song of Rizzo and two motor-boats. 

Sixteen heroic men and four torpedoes, 

That broke the guarding wall of ten destroyers. 

And, killing both the giant dreadnoughts there, 

Entombed them in your sheol ! Airy heights. 

And steep aerial valleys, dizzy skies, 

Rainbows, and high-winds, and ye oft-congealed, 

Recuperating clouds, speak out, declare 

What human hawks, man-falcons, dove among you, 

Hunting their prey ; what climbing seas they sailed, 

O'er strongholds throwing down resounding death. 

Warning like balanced eagles scared Vienna, 

[8] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Pouncing on ships and ramparts out of skies, 
Down-swooping into battle-fields through mists 
As lightnings out of storm-clouds riddle earth, 
And chasing regiments and skimming trees 
Like insect-scooping swallows. Rouse the south. 
Freed Monte Santo ; pitch a key to reach 
San Gabriele in the north till he 
Makes a duetto of deliverance, ' 
Thrilling Isonzo on his lofty tongue 
Till all the echoing regions round cry out, 
" What bells peal out of heaven?" Let him say, 
\^'as not the fight that crashed around his crest. 
Lighting a taper through the darkened world, 
As if the archangel of his name had sparred 
With dense, surrounding, cloudy hosts of hell. 
Till Michael, with the swords of God, had come. 
Angels and men, blaring on seraph-trumps. 
To rescue glory and restore the light ? 

A limit rims the coinage of man's power. 

Though imaged in the mint and die of God. 

Yet we man's emblem, in thy fourth seal stamped. 

Behold henceforward and forever see — 

Topping the utmost peak, high over the ledge 

That builds the boldest eagle's windy nest. 

In dark-limned outlines, man, a sable crest, 

On rocks and ice, a black and silver wreath. 

Above a field of Alpine snows, the white 

Of a shield argent, vast, and issuant 

Out of a golden coronet and flames 

Of ribs of sunrise curled around his feet — 

This on thy seal and mountains we behold, 

The figure of thy glory on the Alp, 

Man's silhouette engraven in the sky ! 

V 
Blow, organ, blow. 
Plaintive and slow. 
For a world's hope in Italy laid low ! 

At last our dragging feet, slow trailing thine, 

Have pledged our rvtsted sword, that six months toils 

Behind thy spring and summer victories 

To build a forge and hammer out our strength. 

Then sudden comes the eclipse of thy October — 

Death's glazing eye, and autumn's. 

October — feverish in his caving house ; 

The last red rush of apoplectic life ! 

October — when the armies of the wood. 

Brittle and sallow, fly before the blast! 

God tempers with fire the steel of man's spirit. 
Handling our edge so tight it only cuts 
Our destiny where His grip clenches ours. 

[9] 



ITALY REVEALED 

About to thrust in heat our weapons all, 
He flings thy falchion foremost. 
Thus, Italy, in thy book, 
The brief and index of our cause. 
The daj-s of agony begin to write. 
Yet if God's anguish angelize our way, 
It posts around the end its guard of light. 

By double treachery tricked, and double-stabbed, 

Great Russia withers — fallen, doubly fallen. 

And fallen shrinks Rumania at her side. 

The dragons, from the carcase of the east. 

Swing up their gulping necks, 

To swivel every coil around the west — 

To crack thee, Italy, then France constrict. 

As Moses over Egypt stretched the rod 

That bred the east wind through a day and night 

Into a morning drenched with locust clouds 

That quenched with killing pools each greening thing, 

So, Italy, from the rod stretched over thee, 

Out of the east an ominous rustle scouts, 

Lifting a lying tongue among the trees. 

A day, a night, and out of whispers blown. 

Over the Julian and the Carnic Alps 

The dragon of the east wind rears and strikes. 

Hissing the startled hills, 
She coils and rears and strikes. 
As thunders rear and bellow 
And coil and roar and hiss. 
Glaring among the shrinking trees. 
She coils and rears and strikes. 
As wicked lightnings gleam and dart 
In the tongue and eye of night. 

Thy trees are swaying. They exclaim together. 

Their souls are afflicted. They are sore afraid. 

They cringe from the striker. They bend down backward. 

They swerve to heaven. They rock from side to side. 

They strain to escape, but they cannot. 

The lashings of death rail upon them. 

Their veins swell up with poisons of sheol. 

Out of the clouds of the blackness of the locusts of the pit. 

They sting them to fury. They drive them mad. 

Their heads wave together. They tug in frenzy. 

They leap. They pitch. 

In the sweat of the fear of the strength of their anguish 

They wrench their feet out of the earth and crash against the hills. 

Thy leaves are flying. They dance before the dragon. 
Thy red leaves cry out in-the venemous air 
Like hearts of men in the torments of hades. 

[10] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Like darting flocks of frightened birds 
They shoot the slopes of Monte Nero, 
Dashing, swirling, clambering over mountains, 
Clamoring among the hills, 
Covering the Alps with terror. 
Falling in the valleys and choking up the streams, 
Where the leap of the locust devours them — 
Child and maid and the babe with her mother. 

Earth mirrors in her grey and ghastly face, 
Swung like a pendulum to the swaying rage 
That drives thy hurrying leaves, their blighting fear, 
Where flying torments never couched in words. 
Abnormal as the gouging touch of hell. 
Misshapen, foul, distorted warps of dread, 
Besplashed with every hue of woe and death, 
Yellow as rotting parchments, black as plagues, 
Hectic as fevered cheeks round burning eyes. 
Red as rashes, white as lepers, speckled as pox, 
Grisled as skeletons startled out of tombs — 
All shapes and tints and attitudes of terror 
That out of Caporetto stream and wail 
Like flying meteors through a darkened land, 
Waving their shadows up above the earth. 
Fling all their terrifying ghosts across 
The visage of the world. 

Let the earth pray. Let Italy fall on her face. 

Let the peoples cry out of sackcloth. 

Will not the God of mercy hear ? 

The King is with his men, his broken heart 

Ascending up to heaven, and bending down to the land. 

Let God fulfil the promise of the King's name : 

Victor — " God with us !" 

The Queen of her people implores their God, 

The soul of her love melted within her. 

The lifted hands of her toil crying aloft. 

The women of Italy writhe in distresses. 

Their hearts poured out into their bended knees. 

Fear, ye wicked, the sword of the prayer of faith. 

Be strong, Diaz ! Gather the youth of the land together, 
The old man, the boy, the straggler broken from rank. 
To reenforce the rout, to make a stand at the river. 
They fly, they wade, they sink, they swim the Tagliamento. 
Stand ! stand ! stand ! They fly ; they will not stand. 

Be strong, Diaz ! Gather the youth of the land together. 
The old man, the boy, the cripple crumpled by war, 
To push against the flight, to stand with God at the river. 
They flee, they surge, they dive, they splash across the Livenja. 
Stand ! stand ! stand ! they flee ; they will not stand. 

[11] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Be Strong, Diaz ! Gather the youth of the land together, 

The old man, the boy, the angels camping their wrath. 

In the azure tent of God the cry of Italy kneeleth. 

They come like sheep that leap the wash of the wool at the shearing. 

Quavering through the stream, gasping out of the water. 

Stand ! stand ! stand on the brink of the Old Piave ! 

Stand ! stand ! stand ! They pause, they halt, they stand. 

The number of their king is there. 

The Breaker of Italy's seals hath loosed 

The anagram of God-with-man. 

They gather ; they lean against God 

On the edge of the rim of the river. 

Ye bayonets of Britain and France, 
Why trench behind the Adige ? 
Omnipotence pitches the wall of the land 
On the margin of the Piave. 

Hail, wall of life, damming death and evil ! 
Hail, wall of light, firm as the sway of angels ; 
Burnished with fire of seraphim, 
Incensive, gloriable around, 
Numerous-eyed and numberous-winged. 
All standing by unseen ! 

VI 

Through frozen winter and unthawing spring 
Her frosted courage to the old earth clung, 
Or hibernated in a drawled suspense. 

Prepare, ye nations ! Lest the earth should say, 
" I have delivered me with my own right hand," 
Ye drink of the gall-wine's bitter with Italy, 
France and England staggering in the coil, 
America unhelpful, until God 
On Italy's bank reopen victory. 

As the malicious spirit, barred in ice. 
Foments his rancor till the homing sun, 
Melting the lock, unjails him, and then enters 
The freshet's supple body, driven mad 
By meditations murderous that pitch 
Demoniac fury down the roaring gorge 
In a debauchery of destruction ; so, 
Out of the Arctic and the icy east 
Piling his convolutions' catapult, 
With hate so hot it fires the bitter cold. 
The homicidal dragon of the north 
Sways, preening to the hissing of the blast, 
Before the fascinated soul of France, 
Whetting the murder of his cruel eyes, 
That pop with venom and with cunning glare. 
Plotting to seize the vernal equinox 
And chariot on its wing across the trench. 
He calls his mate ; but, in the fiery menace 

[12] 



ITALY REVEALED 

And blistery grapple of Italy's burning soul, 

She dare not swerve a flank nor shift an eye. 

We watch our hope in pawn between the dragons — 

The wedge that splits the forking tongue of hell. 

Hold the Piave ! Heart of Italy, stand ! 
Each sunrise swings a pontoon in the bridge 
That we, adventurous like thy Genoese, 
To pay his new world's debit to his old. 
Build back along the ocean-trail he blazed. 

We strain, America ! Double your haste ; 
Put spurs to energy ; larrup the task ! 

What fury howls ? The winds of March wrench out, 
And in their lunge the dragon of the north, 
From gashed Saint-Quentin, out of racked Cambrai, 
Encoils the British vitals, whelmed back. 
Brave England buckles. Ravenous, the fangs 
Probe to the heart and reins. Bapaume is down ; 
Bril falls, and Peronne; the long-suffering Somme 
Is tottering to the fringe of Amiens. 

Shall bending Britain break? Our engineers 
Drop spade for gun and die against the gap. 
O that our strength were there ! 
Our boys sit bivouacked : O for ships, the ships 
To march them through the sea ! 

The crusher lags, sheers off the British shank, 
Nursing his hurt and cluttering his coil. 
His mate stirs sibilant to his beckoning hiss. 

Italy, cling ! The nations, like a shutter, 
Rock on the hinge of their hope, 
Swung from the nail of thy valor. 

We twist on the nerve of our anguish : 
Be swift, America ! 

What month wails meagre in, bleached with despair ? 

Is this young April, darling of the year? 

A worm is in the bud. The north wind yells, 

Rocking life's cradle to the dragon's stroke. 

The unhealed scabs of Flanders, raw again, 

Rip, moaning, off their sores. 

The British blade from Ypres to Arras shakes, 

Crooks at the center to the serpent, props 

The soul of England in her bout with death. 

Her grim back 'gainst the sea. 

The fangs droop baffled, like a criminal 

That cannot awe his judge. 

[13] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Italy, watch the saurian ! Blazy-eyed, 
Her gorge grows wicked to her mate's distress ! 
Clench the last ounce ! Over the arching trail — 
The span thrown out of England, and our span. 
Spliced in mid-ocean — double-quick, our boys 
Swing to France, singing. Lock your clutch and cling ! 

Hung in a grapple on the river's rim. 
Against our agony, 

This body raveling from this denuded soul. 
We grip the gnawing lizard to our pain ! 

May throbs in squalling, like the life of man 

That, born in rosy buds, breaks swagging down 

Into red dews of death. All scarlet wrath, 

The great red dragon bloods the bloom of France 

From Noyon unto Rheims. 

May's pinky whites stain into bleeding crimsons 

Around the strangled month — her blossoms bleaked, 

Her wheat-fields flailed, her vine and terrace swooning. 

God save thee, France ! the coils unkink again. 

Swimming the Aisne, Soissons enveloping. 

Entangling trouble in the ruddied Marne. 

One lurch away, unterrified Paris wipes 

Hate-snortled virus out of her smarting eyes. 

Perched on his cowardice behind war's risk, 
A grizzly wraith, the parody of Satan, 
In rattling armor clothed, and railing speech, 
Champs Hohenzollern, shaking bloody words 
Out of his heart, and, off his bloody steel, 
A red rain on the earth. 

Screw the last nerve to courage, Italy ! 
One turn of the capstan warps us in. 

Our knuckles clamp around the dinosaur 
Like wrath round hell's rim ! 

May ends in pangs ; June enters, crying out 

In pain to be delivered. Cruel midwives. 

North winds abrade her, while the embrangling snake 

Constricts maternity into violence, 

Where, eyes in sorrow, bowing on her bed, 

June bears war's monstrous birth of life and death. 

Be valiant, Italy, this wailing day 

A woe and a deliverance are born. 

An omen : Chateau-Thierry sees our sons 

Shunt back the death-lunge shot at Paris. 

Enraged, that his cankerous fangs 
The heart of France should miss. 
The monster flags his mate 
In a red-slavering hiss. 

[14] 



ITALY REVEALED. 

Look to her, Italy ! Her hatred curls 

Round Asiago, smothering his plain. 

She spools her wrath round Grappa, strangling him, 

With his Ferrara in her winding sheath. 

Her covetous fangs lust, lanky, lickerish. 

Her tongue laps murder, thirsty as the pit. 

Her famished dartings knit across the Piave, 

Bridging the banks with needles in thy flesh. 

Zenson reels, tortured. II Montello's rent. 

The Piave leaks from Capo Sile south. 

Her withering poisons cramp thy jerking thews, 
And spray thy seeing into cloudy night. 
Thy soul recedes from the jar of her impact. 
From the sickening thud of her coil on thy chest. 
Back over thy spine thy shoulders jut like cliffs, 
Their vigor bent like Pisa's leaning tower, 
Inclining in a perilous crisis, swaying 
Like Pisa's vertigo in a powerful wind. 
Thy strength is pendulous : elastic spirit's 
Return steers upright, forward, outward, leaning 
Far over the Piave, sword inclined 
Aslant the cringing dragon, cutting deep. 

Thy parched avengement quaffs her, Italy, 

Quenched to the hilt at Castalunga. 

She's tapped at Zenson, half the spigot out. 

Her liquors spurt, more gules than Red- Sea water. 

'Tis drink and bright apparel : she attires 

Thy hurts in dripping gifts — 

Clothes II Montello in her scarlet raiment. 

The mantle of her blood. 

And Capo Sile wraps in crimson garments. 

The ebbing of her strength. 

Prodigal with the anilines of death, 

She stains thy kirtle gorgeous. 

The heavens chastise her wickedness. 

Rolling their thunders against her ear, 

And plumbing her heart with the prongs of lightnings. 

They spue her out of their mouth. 

With breath of tempests, in spital of storms. 

The torrents swarm upon her. 

The floods rise out of their bed to maul her. 

The passion of the Piave swings his hate. 

Sweeping away the bridges, plunging her into wrath. 

The river beats her prone, stretched writhing across. 

Heaven reproves her with the weapon of man. 

She is cupped to the quick ; she moults ; 

Her scales peel, scattered ; her flesh flakes off. 

Her strained nerve snaps : recoiling through the stream, 

Her wounds disturb the red ford of their blood. 

[15] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Listen, ye nations, to the Triumpher, God, 

Blowing the clarion of the Alps to thrill 

Her hour of victory through the widowed earth ! 

VII 

Under two flaming swords and cherubim, 

Stars facing, sun to sun, their amberous wings 

Curving plumed shoulders up a goldeny arch. 

Thy sixth and seventh seals stand, Italy, 

Twin victors, like twin angels double-bloomed 

Out of the twin-bud thy fifth seal disclosed, 

Of Godhead loaning man His agony 

To wrestle darkness on the brink of life. 

Thy radiant sixth around her sister sparkles 

Her mystic number of the deliverance 

Of victory over evil well begun; 

And thy exultant seventh on tiptoe raises 

Her number to the glorious cherubim. 

To loose the mystery of her warfare finished 

Into the sabbath of a perfect work. 

The touch of glory instantly unseals 

The jeweled swords of five victorious months. 

Keen as the eye of the eagle's swooping wing, 

Stern as the coals of the wrath the heavens fling. 

Warring with war to kill the accursed thing. 

July comes, torch and blade. As once his heat 

Resolved the charter of our liberties. 

And razed the Bastille, melted down off men. 

So now the vehemence of his anger smokes 

To burn away from freedom another hell. 

He sends thee, Italy, his first four days 

To scorch the dragon's hope on Monte Grappa, 

And bids his sixth day singe the last of her 

Off the Piavian delta's wrinkled throat. 

The dinosaur, subdued, 
On bank and hill and plain 
Wails her curdled brood. 
Two hundred thousand slain. 
The earth throws eyelids wet 
Up sparkling into light. 
Where Alpine signals set 
Judgment's return to Right. 
Allies, out with glaives ! advance ! 
Delve the dragon out of France. 

The strangler round the June-scream of his mate 
Had flung a coil ; but no coercive cry 
Ransacks his succor from her sprawling wound. 
Eyeing thee, Italy, out of France, his glare 
Lights on thy outstretched valor ramping through 
Albania ; sees it swinge his warmate off 

[16] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Vayusa, Malacastra Heights, and, coursing 
Astride the Orsum, comb her from Berat ; 
And spies her, in the scuffle in the bend 
Of the DevoH, south of Elbasan, 
Pitched from lozi, Mah Siloves' crest. 
Back drooling to the Skumbi. 

His bristling fury in its own shadow sees 

Thy striplings, Italy, retrieving France : 

Three hundred thousand at the thrilling task 

Of guardianer of Rheims. 

Thy sturdy slips he scowls at — olive-tinctured, 

Tinting whole forests of our sapling pines, 

Dug off the husky slopes of liberty 

To reen force the sap and pith of France 

And spread a shelter over her despair. 

He dare allow no pause to loll against 
Our daily thickening of armament. 
Ferocious frenzies through his wicked eyes 
Dart to impale their newest foes. He throws 
His long death-struggle, thrashing in the earth, 
The wrenched old planet creaking on her posts. 
Four fiendish days and four demoniac nights. 
Across the vale of Ardre, Italy, 
The bars of thy flesh go banging to and fro. 
Pounding the slamming blasts unpacked from the pit. 
Four murderous days and slaughterous nights assault 
Rheims' coat of mail — the interlinking plates 
Of Italy's lives — where death falls, glancing off 
Panoplied Rheims, screened Epernay, masked Chalons. 
Four days and nights the gambling dice of hell 
Rattle against thy ribs, and lose the throw. 

From four climbed days and nights the tide-wave 's pushed 
One foot-slip down the ebb. Like Italy's brave, 
America's with Gouraud shield Champagne, 
Defend Chalons, and, 'gainst the shifting Marne, 
Hanging their pluck in the way of the serpent, 
Cling to that gate of Paris with their souls. 
And almost with the fury of bare hands 
Thrust back the outrageous dragon. 

The trump of thy June battle, Italy, 

Winds through July's stout spirit not in vain. 

He gazes past the brazen skies, and sees 

Our battle-weight pull down the golden scale, 

God's glory in the bowl. Storm-helm and cloud. 

That helped the Piave, rage around us now. 

Between the Marne and Aisne, spinning our strands 

Into the gossamer of the long grey mist. 

Drumming to silence our advancing noise 

With gun-fire out of heaven. 

[17] 



ITALY REVEALED 

God weaves us into the night and wet 
Till the tangled serpent swings in our net. 

Out of the pillar and cloud of God, 

Mangin, Petain, Foch, and France, 

Pershing, and America, 

Thunder the dragon to the sod, 

Javelined with lightning's lance. 

God's hammers clang him there. 

Writhed in a gnarled despair, 

Against the anvils of the steel of Italy. 

By day, by night, in his flaring forge, July, 

Blowing his fires pitiless-high. 

With iron mallet on the warping thing, 

Rimmed to our hoop of scathing arms that sear it, 

Around, against our incensed ring, 

Pestles the dragon's hulk and spirit. 

The blazing wrath of sweating August swears 
A shriveling vengeance to sear out his stain. 
Blotched four years past, when hydrophobic hate. 
Snapping among the dog-days, bit them mad, 
Gnashing the whole world into crazy war. 
August has weighed our metal, peering through 
The gadding curtains of the skies : he knows 
What bayonets our marching sea-lane throws, 
Three hundred thousand, unto each new month. 
These in a wracking avalanche he crashes. 
And Soissons, salvaged from the crusher, lives; 
While the maimed demon, skulking from the Ourcq, 
Where fighting palls him, twists around the Vesle 
His snarled resistance in a knot of rage. 

Where murder's garroting loop rubs Amiens; 
Fierce August stokes the furnace of his wrath 
Under the grill of Haig's men, flamed to crisp 
The creeper's edge with broiling bars, that spark 
The prairie boys of Illinois afire. 
Inflammable sons of Lincoln and of Grant 
That smelt the ebbing monster off Chipilly. 
Norward the conflagration chars the coil. 
Crackling from strangled towns, out of whose corses — 
Marred Bapaunie. blemished Noyon — haggard ghosts 
Faint back against the scrawny arm of France. 
August, well done ! Thrust red between thy tongs. 
Fear's hot coal scalds the leathern heart of hate. 
Where HolienzoUern's throne haunts him, aslope. 

What sable-pknny crest 

Waves war-cry ? 'Tis September's, 

Whose unavenged unrest 

Through four black years remembers 

Horrors, whose great welts are 

[18] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Ridged throbbant through his heart, an ulcering scar. 

He watched the hideous heel advance, 

Dripping the crunch of Belgium's bones, 

Swaggering on the breasts of France, 

Grinning through her groans, 

Almost wading to his lust. 

The grinding into blood and dust 

Of the old-young face of Paris. 

Always his days have greedily recalled 

How through the Marne grim Jof fre that horror mauled ; 

And, angel of the avengance of the Somme, 

He waves the scorpion of Britain on. 

It stings : Peronne's redeemed. It flogs a breach 

In the red boa from Drocourt to Queant. 

We gash the curling mangier past the Vesle ; 

And, from the Oise to Rheims, with France we shear* 

And tear and fold it, ragged, back to Conde, 

Like tailors ripping cloth. 

Verdun's vendetta cries : September nods ; 

And, swift as words, the knights of Pershing whip 

The serpent's crook off Mihiel at a crack; 

And grip it in the Argonne, snake and den 

And jungle lashing through the earth and sky. 

Choked in our clutch — to cling to crime's convulsion 

Till death has rattled through it. 

These are the days of over-tortured earth's 
Recovery out of shell-shock, morn by morn 
Hearing the whetstone on God's rhythmic scythe 
Mowing the haunch of murder back to hell. 

The ardors of thy reapers, Italy, 

In these crusading tasks to gather France 

Out of the abyss, from dawn to dawning toil — 

Even as thy stamina on the Piave's marge 

Makes what is possible. 

And eastward now September 

Invokes the fellowship of thy limber arm 

Against a cunning beast, and, lo, 

Thy aid heaps up the Macedonian blow 

That drops Bulgaria's red tool into woe. 

And a far crash the gibbering Turk appals : 

Down through his crumbling empire's sagging walls, 

Out of his hand, ancient Damascus falls. 

Striding up the mirrors of the sky, 

October's red-gold torch and brand flare nigh. 

Yet ere he quits. September's ire must try 

To break the Hindenburg line. 

That never has budged for man or gun or mine. 

[19] 



ITALY RE\'EALED 

Ho, Italy, they come : black-diamond eyes 
Flash Italy from these yellow strings of beads, 
Threaded on khaki, charging for New York — 
The high, uplifted giant of the skies 
That swings earth's western gate toward liberty 
Above the crouching nations. 

They'll crack old Hindenburg, or their own hearts. 

They run, swerve, fall, creep, lift, trip, stagger, stumble, 

The sons of freedom in the twisting snake. 

Spectral, before, around, behind, among them, 

A Proteus, up from subterranean lairs 

His helly forms all simultaneous rearing. 

No sooner do we think the battle won. 

Than new fangs stab our flanks that, wheeling, see 

Dizzy eruptions through the old cracked earth — 

The virulent eczema of the oozing pit. 

Inflamed in all its pores, exuding fiends. 

So seeing, still we fight, fall, creep, up-stagger, 

And, falling, creeping, staggering, fight until 

The Hindenburg line drops broken into hell. 

Italy, taps ! the frosted plume commands : 

October, gorgeous in his golden mail, 

Remembering Caporetto. 

Taps ! prepare a toil with rest ; 

Then, up at reveille. 

Leaping with conquering dreams, 

Make real what but seems, 

Ripping the dragon's crest. 

The eye of his purpose set to Italy's clock, 
By slaying the saurian to doom her mate, 
October drives the dragon of the north. 
Dragging Saint-Quentin from the haggled snake, 
And tattered Cambrai, shrunk Laon, and Homs, 
And Ostend, Lille, old Douai, and their kin. 

Straught Belgium, in her right mind rearrayed. 
Sits in the gates of Brup;es. her coasts redeemed. 
The streaming fragments of the smotherer's power, 
Like a great fungus, creeping toward the north, 
Save where our sons in Argonne-Forest latch 
Hate's throat in death and hem his heart in judgment. 

Leaving the strangler in our stricture caught. 
On Caporetto night, loud trumpeting. 
Dripping blood-crimson flame, October's sword 
Flares on the Brenta and the glad Piave. 
LTp, Italy ! with the wrath of heaven 
Sickle the great deliverance given. 

Judgment, thundering out of Monte Grappa, 
Leaps roaring on the rocks of Asiago, 
Under the gleaming eyes of startled night, 

[20] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Who springs awake, her black flanks on the mountain 

Plunging like frightened steeds. 

A palsied rumble grips the throat of earth, 

Coughing and hiccoughing a sanguine death 

That clutters and coagulates the air. 

The dragon rolls from sleep, 

Pitched out by noises and a noxious hail : 

Hissing and belching like the smudgy pit, 

She murderously wraps the Italian armies. 

Their tussle tramping down the shuddering dark. 

The hours behold it, muttering to heaven, 

While night, grown paler, down the mountain roams. 

Moaning against the woods. 

Entangling in her hair the shivering trees. 

The eyelids of the morning, red and sore. 
Lift heavy out of vigils, opening slow 
The eye of day, all bloodshot, draggling garments 
Splashed and bedabbled in the blood of earth. 
He stares upon the foes, too strung to know it 
His light enrages them : their tearing sinews. 
Streaking the sky with splots of splattering death. 
Make day more hideous than savage night. 

Let wickedness rumple this plateau and peak. 
Light locked in darkness, day in night, until 
The dragon's throes drip limply, trickled thin 
As sievy earth sifts seeping rains ; until 
The number here of Italy's fated sons 
Is twenty thousand perished, and the hurt 
Groan, sixty thousand souls. 

The army of thy right hand's picking up 
The islands of the Piave, Italy, 
While two of thy armies strain, amphibious. 
Sagging from either bank down through the river. 
Why do the heavens weep around the battle ? 
And why does the flood let swollen eyes o'erflow 
The bridges, crashing through his tears. 
Leaving thy hope imperilled ? 

But God sends courage where 
Pent Italy might despair. 
His anger's not in nature, as before. 
And courage can pry open her shut door. 
He bids thy engineers rebuke the river, 
Arguing in the friendly mask of night, 
Under the stingings of the demonian hiss ; 
And bridges rise, and swim : thy armies cross. 
And firm, with legs astride the Piave, fight 
Like two great pillars of a mighty land. 

[21] 



ITALY REXEALED 

The dinosaurus sways deceived, 

Caught in the vail around her heart, 

The cunning of her fire-eyes steeped 

In folly straight before her. 

She winds up her strength on Monte Grappa, 

Mindless of the winding fingers 

Coiling round her coil like death round death. 

But, wondering at her, under eager browns 

Valdobbiadene sees it from afar; 

And bright Solize sees it, peeping out 

Over the edges of her shining bank. 

Under October's mask of golden haze, 
Diaz deceived her with a regiment, 
Sons of Ohio and the woods of Penn, 
Whose daily march of new accoutrements 
Out of Troviso. stealing in at night, 
Aroused the laughter of the Carnic Alps, 
To see the dragon damped and Ital)' thrilled 
With courage as our Blobdingnagians lake 
The stature of three hundred thousand men. 
They leap the Piave, and the saurian broods 
Scurry ghost-haunted through Venetia 
And into the Tagliamento plunge their fear. 
Chased by the armies of one regiment. 

The Slinger hurls thee, Italy, out of His wrath 
Straight to the heart of the cause and guilt of the war. 

Thou hast trapped the black night in the mountains 
And broken her flank on thy wheel. 
Heaving the power of her crest 
Into the valley of retribution. 

October sings over the peaks, 
Across the plains, and the valleys of rivers. 
Dragon's-blood splashing on tree and bush. 
Her scales, that swim on his blade, 
Fly into the air like sparks of rainbows. 
Sprinkling forest and thicket and grass — 
Green and yellow and red scales, 
And brown and speckled and crimson. 

The leaves clap hands, and laugh at themselves, 

In pied costumes of scales and blood 

As in a day of carnival. 

They sing the song of her judgment. 

Strumming on the wind. 

Dancing showers rinse out of the sky 

The memory of Caporetto ; 

And the good old sun walks out, all tenderly 

Leaning on his daughter. Italy, 

Touching her sorrows with the hues of heaven. 

[22] 



ITALY REVEALEU 

The old and new months in the midst of work 
Swap saddles in the field, 
One loth to quit, and one imperious 
To glut his vengeance to a sudden end. 
Done - — in too bright a flash for mortal eye ! 
Without a lull in battle, swerve, or blench, 
Or jar, where Diaz and his armies sweep, 
October's gone — November's crashing blade 
Gallops the charger, furious as he. 

Abrupt November arms eleven days : 
Three at both dragons' throats, eight more at one. 
With double falchions, forged for double tasks. 
Three victoring days serve France and Italy, 
A sword in each ; and in the Meuse-Argonne 
The serpent's power is broken in the neck, 
And keen Americans like greyhounds lope 
To spill his death-wound there. 

Around the dinosaurus, Italy, 

Three knighted days with flashing falchions leap 

From peak to peak, and down thy river banks. 

Where the Piave and the Brenta wind 

Their ribbons out on sea-spools ; chasing death 

Off Monte Grappa, Monte Pertica, 

Montello, and their fellows, driving her 

Down off the ridges to the Piswe's brink; 

And off Fonzazo and Quero, thrown 

Into the vale between ; and, northward, sweep her 

Off Monte Baldo, through the Valle Arsa, 

From Revereto, out of Trento ; scourge her 

South-easterly across the recovered plains 

And ransomed valleys of Venetia, 

Beyond Belluno, and beyond Udine, 

Thrilling Trieste with her dream come true. 

And freeing Pola, singing to the sea — 

Leaping from vales to hills, from peaks to valleys, 

Unmanacling the towns, unchaining rivers, 

November's vengeance and his firstborn days 

Destroy the dragon and unhook her spoil, 

Seizing a half a million of her brood 

Alive, and piling up a countless dead 

On the heaped mountains and in choked ravines, 

Like lost leaves out of tempest-stricken woods. 

The end is come 

Of guilty centuries of greedy wrong : 
Surviving victims and dead martyrs strow 
Their exultations on her whimpering woe. 

The dragon of the Danube, 
That through thy mountain rolls, 
Red-writhing in her death, 

[23] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Doth she repent our slain souls, 
In her expiring breath? 

The strange amalgamation of old hates 
Undoes her metals : see, 
Out of her crumbled thigh and belly gush 
The swallowed nations, free 1 

'Tis done ! 'tis done ! • 
Down the angelic sky 
Let a hymn cry, 
" The war is won ! " 

'Tis done ! November, in a peal of lights. 

Flares eight days thundering round the rim of France, 

Through Flanders-field, through clanging Belgian gates. 

Through Argonne, crashing to avenge Sedan, 

And war is done, the dragon of the north 

Whining for mercy under the peoples' feet. 

What's in the earth? a storm of shooting stars? 
The splitting skies shed crowns and royalties : 
By scores, disheveling the firmament, 
Princes and dukes and kings and emperors 
Shell, parachuting out of tipsy thrones. 
Their dribbled glories frayed to purple sparks 
That fade in transit like the meteor's flit — 
The best decoronation earth has seen. 

The peoples slack a sigh through every town : 

Out of the muffled years they slip ungagged ; 

They smile ; they laugh ; they hum ; they sing ; they pour 

Into the streets like bees at swarming-time. 

And shout, grab one another, dance, and yell. 

Old men up-kicking heels like yearling colts, 

And stately dames kidnapping strangers, shying 

Like skittish two-year-olds down crazy streets, 

Entangled in confetti, jangling bells, 

Tooting tin-horns, and murdering fifes and drums 

In wild delirium, under twitching stars 

That rub their poor old orbs at giddy earth. • 

Glee's dizziest madcap fits the world to-night. 

Dance on, dear flighty peoples! life has been 

Four years suspended at the tip of hell, 

Swung from an eyelash — nay, the gossamer thread 

Of God's eternal goodness. Dance and sing, 

And loose the heart's thanksgiving, psalming Heaven ! 

'Tis over — acted, done ! 

Blue-gold, the avengeful sky 

Wipes his red weapon into the sheathing cry, 

" The war is won ! " 



[24] 



ITALY REVEALED 

VIII 
Here wrath should end. But what fantastic voices, 
Like leaves that rattle grave-yards windy nights, 
Chatter and screak their antique selfishness, 
Till ghostly gabble troubles up an age 
We thought long buried under ugly scars 
In dark unfathomable hates of war? 

Is sense jarred out of cue ? Ears think they hear 
The old snake-charmers of the Senate Chamber 
Beat veto tom-toms and howl incantations, 
Lest earth eclipse war with a League of Nations, 
And, cHpping' strife and battle, shear 
His wiggeries off the baldness of old greed. 
Howl, old dwarf's fistful of anachronists ! 
Make earth stand still, or trundle back an age ! 

Is this our world late squeezed, by the skin of her teeth. 
Wet-mangled through such agonies as we think ? 
Has war toiled — incommensurable war — 
Four years, destroying earth ; or do we dream, 
Or waken out of madness? 

Surely, we dream. It is not possible 

Freedom has spokesmen so insensible 

To the world's need, guides so impervious 

To the world's light, as to swing brazen tongues, 

Where honorable law is weighed, to sully men 

Out of man's obligation toward mankind 

With words that shame us with their nude appeal 

To all that 's basest in what 's crooked in us ! 

Back from crusading, must America 

Suffer in audience, assoiling her, 

The same old dragon's hiss of selfishness 

She sailed away to punish ? 

Or is this crawling tickle in our ear 

Only the rattle of the dragon's tail 

That — like all tails of new-killed snakes, boys tell us — 

Wriggles till sundown? 

Freedom needs thy example, Italy, 

And thy devotion to it. 

Thou'rt both a builder of the League of Peace 

And one of the chiefest pillars of her house. 

Like thy Columbus, seeking a new world 

To demonstrate the earth a globe of hope. 

Be ever hope our enterprise, that news us. 

Vigorous, Italy, alike in thee 

And thy discovery, America, 

Oldest and youngest of the mightier powers ! 

Or has thy new bud made the old the youngest ? 

Then, Italy, if we lag, let thy resurgence 

[25] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Rebuke us out of the youngest face of nations, 
Risen to serve, the springtide in thy heart, 
More human than old Rome ! 

For 'tis in sacrificial scars of service — 

No longer faithless, unbelieving, but 

With our own trembling wound-prints thrust in thine — 

W'e know thee, what thou art, one risen indeed 

From earth's dark tomb of thousands of years of strife. 

'Tis not old savage war thou wearest now — 

His murderous, dripping, black-red coronet. 

Thou art not crowned of hell. 

In the damned glamors wreathed of cursing night, 

But throned with holier spell, 

Transfigured in the sorrowy scars of Right. 

What scalding centuries burn 

Hell's lesson in, we learn ! 

As children, dancing to a vivid snake. 

Applaud his vicious lunges, like a game. 

We, fascinated, clap war, when his fangs 

Through Caesar or Napoleon venom earth. 

Though ruinous through lands the charmer glides, 

\\'ith endless murder in his wicked gleam. 

War drafts our virtues and our faults, and adds 
Nothing to virtue but degrading dust. 
Save war that is crime's strict and just police. 
Courage, our soldier-epaulet, we wear 
With bulls and dogs and game-cocks, volunteers 
That stake a life in battle quick as we. 
And pour it out defending what they love. 
Courage to risk life in the killing of it 
Breeds boldest criminals. 'Tis not too nice 
To march with honor, as to charge with vice : 
The braveries of the battle-legion ken 
The noblest and the wickedest of men. 
.War drafts and kills, but cannot father valor. 
War coins no courage ; but the drill of war 
Is the great counterfeiter of brave coin. 
And passes it, coin current, in the field. 
Men, vised 'twixt death and death, war's disciplines 
Compel to bout death's chance- jaw at their front. 
To void death's sure jaw at desertion's rear ; 
Whence trapped compulsion dons the helm of zeal. 

War little edifies the officer 

Who clamps his regiment in gyves of death. 

And serves the canons of his killing art 

The more he screens himself behind his men. 

Great safety growing with high rank, that grabs 

War's glory in inverse ratio to hazard. 

This ignobility brave shoulder-straps 

[26] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Often transgress by risks almost a private's, 
And even war blushes to upbraid them for it. 
Its stains of cowardice, birth-marking war, 
Suggest the inventor — the hallmark of hell. 

Unscrupulous strategy, war's chiefest boast, 

Gambles with tricks, plots inequalities. 

Plants ambuscades, schemes overslaugh with numbers : 

The tactics of the wolf-pack, and its glory. 

War turns us wolves, and drives out nations, packs 

That kill by multitudes, a crime in one man. 

Crime, multiplied by nations, equals glory ! 

Murder retailed is crime ; wholesaled, good war ! 

O hypocritical, inglorious war. 

Red, baseborn, bullying cub of violent hell ! 

Cain taught one-handed murder : thou hast coached us 

To multiply it by ten million men 

And all our sciences, geared up to kill ! 

War is the sheriff, or the criminal; 
Murder, or retribution's sword run through it. 
Four years in pawn to anguish, earth would pump 
Out of her system war, the asp of ages. 
Let sheriff war end war, the criminal. 
Wry-necked in hangman law's avenging knot. 
All just war 's circumscribed within the sword 
Of justice, law, and right ; who glorifies it, 
Bejewels the hangman. Other war is Cain's, 
At Abel with a hell's-brand : kings and peoples. 
Who crown them with it, wear the bands of hell. 

Only in sheriff's badge can strategy 

Serve honorably — an honest deputy 

Of the reign of law, who, using strategems 

To save good lives, none handcuffs unawares 

Save crooks, whose stock-in-trade is tricking justice. 

Constabulary warfare, Italy, 

Wracking all precedents of the shock of battle, 

With body, soul, and spirit thou hast waged 

To the extremity of an ardent people, 

To pay a priceless ransom for the sins 

Of centuries, and get the world reprieved. 

Thy heroism was not 

In twilight courage, where the unspirituous beast 

Takes death without a speculation in it. 

Thy half a million lives, that guled thy altar, 

Wrenched open-eyed, gold day, and weighed in light 

Life's estimation, highest when they gave it. 

In passionate despair, that earth might live. 

O they were not deceived ! not when they knew 

[27] 



ITALY REVEALED 

That sin had found us all out, suddenly, 

And not the Teuton only, trapped in crime. 

'Tis easy to confront the wretch and judge 

The deed our guilt has no investment in. 

But to be striking at a hideous thing 

That is our mirror with our image in it, 

Our image magnified, but only to 

The logical conclusion of our ways ; 

For freedom, life, and light, and hope, to wrestle 

Our own tough wrong of immemorial days; 

To agonize with Satan, yet to fight 

Our hearts, ourselves, our fathers' fathers' guilt, 

Knowing no people 's clear, no land 's acquitted : 

O this is cruel, cruel ! for the doubt 

If God can choose us starts a leaking wound 

Whose siphon lets the courage of the soul. 

To the full house of earth war staged his play, 

Whose first scenes spoke their lines with double sense, 

Their portents waiting in the wings their cue 

To out their horrors in the more fearful acts 

Staging behind the drop-scene. Actors played 

New parts from day to day without rehearsal, 

Feeling death's terror as they spoke his lines, 

Falling upon his dagger. Thousands stood 

Spectators only till insatiate war 

Made the whole house his stage, peoples and theatre 

Emblazing in a slaughterous hell of wrath. 

Ere God's white flame enlightened war's red glare, 

Millions expired in dread and mystery, 

Hoping they played their death-scene not in vain. 

But perishing in the hope. 

So died they, over brain and heart baptized 

Into the agonies of God's strange work 

Of necessary judgment. 

What tragedy, pitiful, sleeps with our slain ! 
There must be in the Heart upholding all hearts — - 
Through infinite tragedy, beyond our ken — 
A terrible compassion for our dead. 

Can God be merciful to the greed that ever 

On earth proposes wicked war again ? 

A passion haunts me that could choke that thing, 

In king or politician, rave it down 

Out of its coil accurst, and crumple it 

Into the shadow of an ended snake. 

This war 's the nailing of God's heart afresh, 
Penumbral round the umbra of His cross 
In Whom we live and move and have our being. 
As beats the word of His power through all that is, 
Felt in the wind, seen in the flower, and heard 

[28] 



ITALY REVEALED 

Lustre of service, rainbowed over death, 
Flashing the lights of heaven uneclipsed. 

Thou art our token, out of tomb and pall, 
That God can bring a people from their fall 
And make their life peal out a nobler chime. 
O never be apostate to His call ! 
Swing the Torch upward to the last steep of time ! 

Build God — Whose toiling visions raise 
Thy slumbers, Italy, from the dead — 
A new cathedral's climbing praise, 
With pillared vault and arching spread 
Of psalms by raised-up nations said ! 

Beauty of use and service-stars avow. 

Purer than Rome's thy glory risen now. 

Some olden dreamer of the golden age. 

Met somewhere in thy sleep, we know not how. 

Endorsed his promise on thy rising page. 

And since God gave thy newer birth 

To lure us from our selfish grip. 

Let sacrifices still equip 

And knight thy serviceable worth, 

Till violence learns from stronger ruth, 

And all the daughters of the earth, 

Some image of thy sheen to win, 

Some radiance of Serving Truth, — 

God in the hand, as on the lip, — 

Come climbing up thy ways, to dip 

The garments of their service in 

Thy fountain of perpetual youth. 



[31] 



ITALY REVEALED 

On trilling boughs, in children, in ourselves 
Experienced in each pulse of heart and brain, 
So, groaning through all sickness of creation. 
His are the burning Eyes of every fever. 
The dying Heart of all we kill in war. 

Our reckless centuries have been more callous 

To God's bruise even than to the hurt of man, 

Though Heaven's heart He lowered out of glory 

One hour to show us while grief lasts God is 

The God of sorrows and acquainted with grief 

Beyond the sum of all the sons of men. 

As God is, we beheld Him, on His shoulder 

Bearing our cross, and made its Curse for us; 

And now we see Him newly-nailed to war ; 

For Love's eternal life, let down from heaven, 

Is, as it ever was, in sorrows, chief. 

Gashed with war's million wounds, war's million deaths 

He dies in the dying, mourns them in the living. 

And in the wicked, the aggressors, groans, 

Bearing the contradiction of their sin. 

The tragedy and waste of war outreaches 

Its only compensation to him it teaches 

To see Love's crucifixion on earth's cross. 

The Weeper over every soldier's grave. 

A beauty lingers on the lids of death, 

A glory in God's anguish writhing there 

In wistfulness so sorrowful despair 

Seems like, or near that other hovereth. 

Broken, our dust and spirit cling to God's breath ; 

Yet as we break we seem to see Him stare 

Into our wreck upon His finger, where 

Our life lies in her ashes, as He saith. 

Our grief we know : the Infinite Woe That stands 

Silent we'd guess if our poor children lay 

Crumbled in our just government to clay, 

And dust of some in other, sweeter lands 

Our passionate hearts could clutch with eager hands, 

But some we never could regain that way. 

O Italy, if the Agonies Divine, 

More tortured by this war than all the world. 

Can lift us into faith out of such sorrow. 

Thy half a million have not died in vain. 

But all is lost, and nothing can avail. 

If Christ be not the Hero of this war. 

The true Prometheus, staked to all our woes 

In bringing the fire of God's love to man. 

To give this flag or that some paltry acre, 

Who'd spill the bright red cup of one man's blood ? 

But to maintain earth's light of God is worth 

All that man's Lover lets us pay for it. 

[29] 



ITALY REVEALED 

It well becomes us to exhort our hearts 

To search the price of peace heaven weighs us at. 

Since every mystery of hfe and death 

This wild war dangles in its savage bud. 

There 's not a people shares this planet's mercy 

That has not sowed the seed war's red scythe reaps. 

Should God mete Germany unmercied justice, 

Which of us could that inquisition bear ? 

We have been saved, but in a great rebuke 

Shaming all calls for penance that yield none. 

Even as the tribes that punished Benjamin 
Were sold in battle to his sword by God, 
So Justice in this war brands the most guilty 
In a hot chastisement that scores us all. 
Warning our past, our present, and our future, 
Of the curst pharisee in every heart, 
Ready to act the Cain condemned in others ; 
And warning skepticism, that sold our day, 
Like Judas, to this cross of war, God is. 
And will, at any cost to Him and us. 
Require our evil, and regard His throne. 
Thank Him, He is, lest hell engulf the earth 
Forever and forever. Hark, ye peoples, 
And hear the rod ! let sorrow teach our sin ! 

Let there be hope where God has written books, 

Scriptures of sorrow, in the nations' hearts ! 

There, Italy, a gospel to the world, 

Against the midnight black of war and death, 

Engrossed by Him Who loosed thy seven clasps, 

The apocalypse of thy existence stands. 

Lettered without and in, an unsealed book. 

Here, in thy palimpsest, lately recovered 

Out of the catacombs of former things. 

Papyrus of a nation old yet new. 

Inscribed in characters Love's hand has traced 

With glorious illumination-work. 

We read thy sufferings, and read with hope. 

Yet, bleared with blood-stain, be thy seven-leaved book 

Only by reverent, trembling fingers took ! 

God crowns His warrior. Italy, we see 

His diadem arraying thee : 

Victorious Anguish ! Agony glory-crowned ! 

Hail, Italy, blazoned in the badge of God, 

The decoration of a million wounds ! 

Thy coronet of glittering scars 

Is brighter than a wreath of stars ; 

Thy gold was beaten out of infinite woes; 

Thy jewels all reflect 



[30] 




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Deacidified using the Bookkeeper p 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxii 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2009 

PreservationTechnolo 

A WORLD LEADER tN COLLfCTIONS PRESEI 

1 1 1 Tnomson Park Orive 
Cranberry Township, PA I6O61 



